Scandal

Only His Hairdresser Knows for Sure

If former studio chief Jon Peters’s book proposal were a movie, it would get an “R” rating for graphic depictions of sex, violence, and brute narcissism. No wonder Hollywood’s elite is obsessed with it. But are these outlandish, self-serving anecdotes about Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Sumner Redstone, and other aging A-listers true? Our correspondent tests the most outrageous claims.

If you’ve grown weary of the daily slog through oatmeal-like press reports about the auto industry, the economy, and whether or not the Taliban is using our weapons against us, then perhaps it’s time to ring up your favorite D-girl or guy and trade in some chits for a bootleg copy of the book proposal for Studio Head, the autobiography of hairdresser turned producer Jon Peters. (You can also find a sizable preview on Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood site.) By the time you get to page two, when it’s revealed that no fewer than two of Peters’s girlfriends called him on separate occasions to crow, “I just fucked the president,” you will understand why HarperCollins, the publishing company owned by Rupert Murdoch, paid a reported $700,000 advance for rights to publish the book. By the time you are halfway into the proposal’s 30 or so pages, your stomach will hurt from laughing, both at the eye-popping exploits that Peters and his co-writer, William Stadiem, promise to reveal in the memoir and at the testosterone- and ego-soaked language they use to tell the story. Sample passage: “Producer of Rain Man, Batman and Superman, among many other blockbusters, Peters came from the lower depths to become the man in Hollywood. Lover of Barbra Streisand, Kim Basinger, Pamela Anderson, Nicolette [sic] Sheridan, Sharon Stone, Salma Hayek and Catherine Zeta-Jones, among many other goddesses, Peters became a Hollywood legend for seduction as much as production.”

A remarkable document, the proposal for Studio Head reads like it was written by El Toro, that steam-snorting Looney Tunes bull with a perpetual chip on his shoulder. And, in keeping with this metaphor, the action has a heightened, cartoonish—but nonetheless riveting—quality and, like the best classic Warner Bros. animated shorts, includes plenty of violence. More than once in the proposal, Peters brags of swinging some Hollywood power player around like a rag doll or lifting him above his head, Hulk-style, having “learned the valuable lesson that fear of physical violence was a more potent negotiating tool in Hollywood than all the illusory gross points in the world.” And when it comes to the ladies described above, the star of Studio Head morphs from Toro into Pepé Le Pew. Indeed, in some of its funniest lines (if unintentionally so), the proposal states: “This book will be as inside-Hollywood as it gets, but it will be anything but a nasty book. It will be a loving book, all about the women Jon loved, the mother he lost, and his never-ending quest for acceptance and redemption.”

All of this is supremely entertaining, but the question that seems to be growing is: How true are Peters’s tales out of school? The issue was first raised by Kim Masters, who worked with Peters and his onetime partner Peter Guber when she co-wrote the 1996 book Hit & Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood. The book details how Peters and Guber’s profligate reign as the heads of Columbia Pictures ended up costing its Japanese parent company, Sony, $3 billion—ground that Peters also promises to cover in his memoir. But in a column she wrote for the Daily Beast in April, Masters warned William Stadiem: “Dude, you will have plenty of material. But good luck checking the facts.” She added that Peters “loved to embellish” and that she and her Hit & Run co-writer, Nancy Griffin, “were determined not to let him slip one past us. He was equally determined to burnish his legend.” A number of Peters’s stories, Masters continued, ended up on the cutting-room floor.

On Monday, Peters received what is potentially a more stunning blow to his credibility when Streisand herself weighed in on the proposal on her official Web site. In the “Truth Alerts” section of the site, Streisand posted: “Just for the record … the claims and statements attributed to me in Jon Peters’ book proposal are either completely distorted or simply untrue.”

As anyone who has worked in or written about Hollywood knows, denial should never be equated with truth, but Streisand is not alone in her repudiation of Peters’s tales. Below, I summarize some of the more eyebrow-raising anecdotes and assertions made in the Studio Head proposal and, where a response could be gotten, add what the subjects of the stories have to say about them. By the way, I also attempted to reach Jon Peters, but I have yet to hear from him. HarperCollins declined to comment.

After landing his first hairdressing gig, at a Manhattan salon that catered to prostitutes and strippers, Peters became a “‘muff dyer,’ a specialist in coloring and coiffing pubic hair.”

Peters and then wife Lesley Ann Warren at the Hollywood premiere of The Jungle Book, October 1967. From Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

He was fierce when cuckolded.

In the late 60s, Peters caught his second wife, actress Lesley Ann Warren, in bed with Warren Beatty and chased the actor around the block, “instilling more fear in the serial Lothario than the rednecks who would kill his character in the upcoming Bonnie and Clyde.” Eight years later, Beatty and Peters buried the hatchet, and the former used the latter as inspiration for his signature role as an oversexed hairdresser in Shampoo.

When I ran this by Beatty, he laughed and told me that these assertions were “amusing but totally untrue.” Lesley Ann Warren concurs: “It’s funny and colorful, but there’s not an iota of truth in that.”

He did not forgive incontinence.

Peters’s legal battles with ex-wife Christine Forsythe, whom he had met on Rodeo Drive in 1986 and divorced by 1987, resulted in his paying her more than $30 million over the years. One of their biggest fights concerned Viacom owner and Forsythe’s onetime boyfriend, Sumner Redstone: “Jon’s priceless antique couch … was the casualty of the octogenarian Redstone’s incontinence. Christine tried to pretend it was only spilled orange juice, but Jon knew better, and sent Christine a case of Depends.”

A spokesman for Redstone calls this “a ridiculous and false story that speaks volumes about Mr. Peters and the literary value of his book.” Forsythe did not respond to requests for comment.

He used embarrassing personal information to broker business deals.

After producing the hit 1976 remake of A Star Is Born, Peters went to Columbia Pictures in search of a production deal. Securing a meeting with studio chief David Begelman, Peters arrived at his appointment with a choice piece of gossip about the executive. Begelman was about to become embroiled in an embezzlement scam that would rock the studio (and would later serve as the basis for David McClintick’s classic book Indecent Exposure). But Peters’s morsel of insider information concerned a much more personal area of vulnerability. During his coiffing career, a “top call girl” had told him that Begelman “lovingly” called his penis “Winkie.” According to the proposal, Peters’s first words to Begelman were “How’s Winkie?,” resulting in a very quick three-picture deal.

He was loved by Peter Guber and was a lover to Guber’s wife.

He “brought Peter into couples therapy [with him], where Peter confessed to the analyst how attracted he was to Jon, not necessarily sexually, but that Jon was the true love of his life.” But around the time of this breakthrough, Guber’s wife, Lynda, heiress to a delicatessen fortune, allegedly had some epiphanies of her own. Peters claims that Lynda left Guber for a lesbian romance that quickly fizzled out. She then “sought solace” with Peters. “Soon the solace got hot and heavy, in what became the Malibu Colony’s summer of love,” the proposal continues. There are descriptions of tongue baths that suggest an erotic film as done by the Farrelly Brothers, Lynda’s declaration that she wants to be with Peters “for all Hollywood to see,” and, just like in an epic popcorn picture, a climactic encounter on Mulholland Drive where Peters tells Lynda that “Peter—and business—came first.” Not surprisingly, Lynda doesn’t take this decision too well, and Peters ends up suspecting that it was she “who played Lady Macbeth and put the poison in Peter’s goblet that would result in Peter’s betrayal of Jon.” (The proposal contends that Guber orchestrated a “palace coup,” convincing Sony to push Peters out of Columbia Pictures in 1991.)

When asked about Peters’s recollections, Peter Guber responded: “After four decades in this industry I will stand by my reputation and Jon Peters should stand by his. I find it surprising that any publisher would be interested in his work of fiction.” Lynda Guber has yet to answer requests for comment made via e-mail, her assistant, and Peter Guber’s production company.

He is “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

According to the proposal, Peters once played “love guru” to a love triangle that involved a former studio chief who was having an affair behind his powerful producer wife’s back with her college roommate, who currently resides near the top of the Hollywood food chain. Peters says he helped the trio “discover how to live happily, albeit separately, ever after.”

He rejected a brazen come-on from Barbara Walters.

When Walters hosted an ABC News special on Peters and Barbra Streisand following the success of their update of A Star Is Born, she invited him to her New York apartment for “a pre-interview interview. Keeping things very chummy, with no pretense of journalistic objectivity, she plied Jon with champagne and caviar, then changed into ‘something comfortable,’ leaving her bedroom door strategically ajar as she stripped down to her bra and panties, giving Jon a 20-20 view, as it were, of the Barbara W in all her glory. Whether Barbara was setting a trap to get the scoop of a lifetime, or whether she was making a sincere pass, Jon didn’t snap at the bait. One Barbra was enough, and he had a blockbuster to promote.”

Via a spokeswoman, Walters responded with the same statement she gave to Masters: “This is the most absurd, ridiculous thing I have ever heard. My only contact with Jon Peters was when I interviewed him and Barbra Streisand, surrounded by television cameras in 1976 for an ABC News special.”

He used violence to broker business deals—resulting in Madonna’s first hit.

For Peters and Guber’s first Warner production, Peters played “Christopher Columbus by ‘discovering’ Madonna, at least for the big screen,” by using her on the soundtrack of the coming-of-age wrestling film Vision Quest. Madonna’s first song from the film, “Crazy for You,” was scheduled to be released shortly before her first Warner album, Like a Virgin, but the company’s executives were afraid the soundtrack single would hurt the impact of the album. That is until “Jon resorted to violence, literally smashing down the door of [then Warner chairman] Bob Daly’s office and pouncing across his desk, ready to kill for his art. Daly backed down, and ‘Crazy for You’ became the number one hit in America.”

As Masters pointed out in her column, a version of this story appeared in Hit & Run, and after the book had been published, she ran into Daly, who told her it wasn’t true.

Contacted about this anecdote, Daly says an argument did take place but unfolded differently. Daly says that he and his co–chief executive at the time, Terry Semel, actually negotiated a compromise with Warner’s record label that they thought would make Guber and Peters happy. “We got them 80 percent of what they wanted,” he says, but when the two Warner chieftains went to Guber’s and Peters’s offices to inform them of the deal, “Jon went ballistic, and the two of us had to be held back,” he recalls. “Terry held me back, and Peter held Jon back. Thank God he did, because Jon is much stronger and crazier than me and he could have killed me.” In the end, cooler heads prevailed. “There was nobody knocking down any doors,” says Daly, who adds that Peters sent him flowers the next day as a peace offering.

To make another, less dramatic point: “Crazy for You” did hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, but not until 1985, by which time Madonna had already released two albums.

He was a source of fascination to Michael Jackson.

Peters was once awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call from a “whispery” voice on the phone “whose first words were ‘I love Batman.’” The breathy vocal stylings belonged to Michael Jackson, who asked if he could visit Peters that same night. He arrived in a helicopter and eventually “became obsessed by Jon, who spent some of the weirdest times of a weird life at Jackson’s Neverland estate.”

He almost fought O. J. Simpson at a Cartier store.

Peters and O. J. Simpson nearly came to blows after Simpson made a play at a party for Peters’s date, the blonde model Vendela. Simpson tried to humiliate Peters with a joke that doesn’t even make sense, “announcing that if he, O. J. and Vendela had a child, it would look like Jon.” A week later, Peters ran into Simpson at Cartier, and O.J. apologized, offering his hand in friendship. In accepting the gesture, “Jon felt a weakness, and for a second, he thought he could take O.J. out then and there among the diamonds and rubies, but he held his fire. Cartier just wasn’t the place for a saloon brawl.”

He outspent A.I.G.

During the time of their Warner production deal, Peters and Guber “made the current excesses of A.I.G. and Citibank look like the austerity of monks.” For example, the company purchased a “vast ocean yacht called Oz and wrote it off to a television show called Ocean Quest,” a five-part documentary series on NBC. Starring former Miss Universe Shawn Weatherly (as “Jacques Cousteau in a bikini”), the show “may have gotten some of the worst reviews in the history of the medium, but the IRS was powerless to call it a scam.” (At least they were at the time.)

Once again, Daly says Peters is taking “creative license” with his tale. “They had a good deal,” Daly says. “But we wouldn’t have let them do anything that wasn’t permitted.” The former Warner chief adds with a laugh: “The best part of Jon and Peter’s deal was the $750 million Warner got for letting them leave their contracts for Sony,” a reference to the breach-of-contract suit that resulted after Guber and Peters recklessly left Warner to run Columbia Pictures.

He used prostitutes and drugs to broker business deals.

As part of a full-court press to get Jack Nicholson to play the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 movie version of Batman, which Peters produced, Peters took Nicholson “on a whore and drug fueled global joy ride to see the Batman sets in London,” using then Warner president Steve Ross’s private jets. (Madam Alex, Peters’s “dear friend” and a “mentor of Heidi Fleiss,” supplied the girls.) Peters continues with the surprising claim that he “turned staid Claridge’s into the Playboy Mansion with strippers, hookers, masseuses, coke dealers and more.”

Abe Somer, an attorney representing Nicholson, says his client denies that any of this happened. “It’s untrue,” Somer says.

As Nicholson’s character J. J. Gittes said in Chinatown: “How do you like them apples?” Daly, who says he’s read the entire proposal for Studio Head, has an interesting take on what is clearly the most attention-getting Hollywood-insider book pitch to be circulated in years. “I think Jon is frustrated and disappointed that he’s not part of the industry like he used to be,” says Daly, who nevertheless found some merit in the proposal. “I wouldn’t say this is a true account of everybody’s life, but I think it would make an interesting book. I could even see it someday as an HBO mini-series or movie.”